The Present Age challenges readers to reexamine the role of the United States in the world since World War I. Nisbet criticizes Americans for isolationism at home, discusses the gutting of educational standards, the decay of education, the presence of government in all facets of life, the diminished connection to community, and the prominence of economic arrangements driving everyday life in America. This work is deeply indebted to the analyses of Tocqueville and Bryce regarding the threats that bureaucracy, centralization, and creeping conformity pose to liberty and individual independence in the western world. The Present Age relates a tragedy—the unprecedented militarization of American life in the decades after 1914, as the result of the necessary resistance to National Socialist and Communist totalitarianism that fed into and reinforced the profound tendencies toward centralization within modern society. Robert Nisbet (1913–1996), former professor of sociology at Columbia University, is the author of Sociology as an Art Form; The Social Philosophers; Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary; The Sociological Tradition; History of the Idea of Progress; and Twilight of Authority, also published by Liberty Fund.
Author
American sociologist, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Vice-Chancellor at the University of California, Riverside and as the Albert Schweitzer Professor at Columbia University. After serving in the US Army during World War II, when he was stationed on Saipan in the Pacific theatre, Nisbet founded the Department of Sociology at Berkeley, and was briefly Chairman. Nisbet left an embroiled Berkeley in 1953 to become a dean at the University of California, Riverside, and later a Vice-Chancellor. Nisbet remained in the University of California system until 1972, when he left for the University of Arizona at Tucson. Soon thereafter, he was appointed to the prestigious Albert Schweitzer Chair at Columbia. On retiring from Columbia in 1978, Nisbet continued his scholarly work for eight years at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. In 1988, President Reagan asked him to deliver the Jefferson Lecture in Humanities, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Nisbet's first important work, The Quest for Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969) contended that modern social science's individualism denied an important human drive toward community as it left people without the aid of their fellows in combating the centralizing power of the national state. Nisbet is seen as follower of Emile Durkheim in the understanding of modern sociocultural systems and their drift. Often identified with the political right, Nisbet began his career as a political liberal but later confessed a conversion to a kind of philosophical Conservatism
